I wrote this back in 1994 as a test for a story idea I was working on. I found it again back in 2012 and found inspiration from it as I embarked on my current writing projects. Here it is, in its largely unedited format:

Vanessa Wakes

A skull crunched under the gleaming boot, crumbling spontaneously into a cloud of black dust. Servos whined within the armored leg as balance was readjusted, and with just the slightest hesitation the trek was continued. The power source was tanta­lizingly close, a faint ebbing echo that hinted at life on a world over ten millennia dead.